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'Duke Nukem: Forever' fails to draw the player in: Video Games

Duke Nukem: Forever

Xbox 360, 2k Games, M (Mature)

This is a joke, right? A long, incoherent joke with a weak punch line. A joke where we laugh at its ineptitude and are startled by its lack of brilliance.

"Duke Nukem: Forever" attempts to modernize a cult video-game classic. The action doesn't require a lot of thinking. To survive, just make sure to keep your finger on the trigger and your ego at maximum levels.

The game's most glaring problem is its crude humor. The people who originally loved Duke Nukem have grown up, and today's audience is a bit more sophisticated, so the humor and sexual innuendoes often fall flat. The whole package comes across as a direct-to-garbage 1980s action movie. If you are more into blasting stuff as opposed to being thoroughly entertained, then this game is up your alley.

It is played from a first-person perspective, and that doesn't help. Attempts were made to spice up the play. Players can take cover, but they have to be aware that the environment is destructible. Cover may last only for a fleeting moment. Inexplicably, players have to endure shrinking and have to dodge aliens while doing things like driving a remote-control car. There are lively sequences where players have to survive while manning a gun turret. Online players can download new content.

"Duke Nukem: Forever" fails to draw the player in. Unless you have been waiting 15 years for this, there is very little incentive to pick it up. Grade: C -

Alice: The Madness Returns

Xbox 360, EA Games, T (Teen)

You will never look at Alice in Wonderland the same way. This is a grim, gritty and often eerie take on the classic story.

Alice is a mental patient in Victorian London with a dark secret. She is torn between confronting her past and suppressing her memory. Players have to navigate London and Wonderland to solve mysteries of her past. The rub is that Wonderland has become as twisted and convoluted as Alice's thoughts. The detailed landscape can make one feel as if he is walking through an enchanted meadow, then suddenly feel trapped in a personal hell. For a game that is not complex in what it asks you to do, it can raise the stress level quite a bit.

This game requires a little thought. You can get so caught up in slashing monsters and goblins that you forget that you are piecing together a puzzle. Not placing everything before the naked eye and twisting the characters and the landscape so that things look familiar but feel noticeably different shows the creativity involved. Wonderland is interactive. Players are always turning valves, shooting pig snouts with pepper, or shrinking themselves to expose passages. Enemies have limited tricks, so surviving a fight requires that you memorize their attack pattern.

Download The Sims Social Cheats and Hack on Facebook

The Sims is the best selling PC series of all time, and now it’s coming to Facebook. Few details have been revealed but Electronic Arts did announce The Sims Social at its recent keynote press conference at E3 2011 in Los Angeles so you better check out the site that you can download The Sims Social cheats that can help you gain the best advantage for your gameplay.

EA is bringing its long-running life simulation series to Facebook with The Sims Social because the total failure of The Sims Online wasn’t enough. EA has announced The Sims Social, a new version of the popular franchise for Facebook.

The trailer showed female friends discussing a romance on Facebook that one of them was having with a real-life crush in the game. Since it involved two women chatting on Facebook about a virtual date that one of them went on with some dude named Tom, the game’s presence at EA’s E3 press conference was short and kind of silly. Sims Social will allow players to cook tapas, watch romantic movies, and get some nookie in the shower, according to their exchange. Aside from that as a player I know that you can get cheats for The Sims Social to boost your account.

The game runs in a browser in classic isometric 2D with a hand-drawn look. The hook appears to be that you will play as yourself and act out scenarios with Sims based on your real-life friends.

You can probably count on being able to purchase your simoleons with real-world money in order to, um, buy your tapas ingredients or something since it’s a Facebook game. No in-game currency system was actually detailed; at this point, the main emphasis seems to be the fact that you get together and interact with your friends via Facebook…but in ways that you can’t currently do that on Facebook. While interacting with other Sims made up of your friends, the game appears to be an isometric title that will allow you to play as yourself. With a social twist and some lighthearted 2D visuals, it will feature many of the complex relationships found in the main series. The game is being co-developed by Playfish and EA’s Sims Studio.

As for when we can expect to play the game, it’s listed simply as “coming soon.” You can keep tabs on the game’s Facebook page for ongoing developments for the meantime also giving up the best output to comply your needs with hack and cheats on going while playing The Sims Social in Facebook.

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